Weehawken Cinderella

by Brett Rutherford

Home by midnight!
A girl can become
a fairy-tale princess
in Brooklyn or Queens.
Even the Bronx
is not out of the question.
The trains run forever,
expressways late night
are not so bad.

Home by midnight!
Forget it, New Jersey!
Hoboken’s waterfront,
heights all the way up
to far Fort Lee — no way
to the ball and back!
Weehawken Cinderella
must pumpkin-float
her outboard regatta
of rowing mice.

Home by midnight?
She didn’t make it.
The slattern sisters take no excuse.
The pumpkin rots in the gutter;
The rodent rowing team has vanished.
(The cat spits bones, and preens
itself in glutton bliss.)

Back to her ashcan
servitude, our heroine,
on the West Side’s wrong side,
mops floors and weeps
with soap-surf teleplays,
forgetting the prince,
the ballroom flatteries,
the one-shoe-off diplomacy,
the sudden dash for door
at bell toll--

No prince would dream
of crossing that river to find her.
Godmother or no, that's how
it ends, all but invisible;
she dies a virgin
on the Hudson Palisades.